Older & Bolder closed June 2013 This is an archived website
HSE SERVICE PLAN GENERATES MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS FOR OLDER PEOPLE [10/01/13]
There is a disturbing lack of detail in the HSE Service Plan 2013 published today. Ms. Patricia Conboy, Director of Older & Bolder said: “There are more questions than answers for older people arising from this new Plan. It announces a cut of 2.6% to the budget for older people, the biggest reduction in funding for any single care group in 2013. Worryingly, the plan provides no detail about how this cut is going to be implemented.” She continued: “The Budget for older people in 2013 will be €392 million, down from €403 million in 2012 and €407 million in 2011. Older people will be concerned about where the axe is going to fall and which services will be affected.”
Patricia Conboy said that Older & Bolder would like to celebrate the commitment in the 2013 Service Plan to maintain home help hours at January 2012 hours. However, she said “We cannot celebrate this commitment just yet”. She explained: “There is a need for more information on the commitment in the 2013 Service Plan to maintain home help hours at January 2012 levels. Originally, the HSE set itself a target of providing 10.7 million home help hours in 2012. Now the HSE is saying that, due to ‘a technical adjustment’, the target should have been 10.3 million home help hours and the commitment now is to deliver that same number of hours (10.3m) in 2013. What we need is some forensic detail on ‘the technical adjustment’ and why the lost 400,000 hours should not form part of a service target in 2013”.
Ms. Conboy concluded: “Over the course of two budgetary years, we have gone from 11.9 million hours of home help in 2011 to 10.3 million in 2013. This reduction will hurt older people suffering disability, frailty and life limiting illnesses, as well as children and people with disabilities”.
NOTE TO THE EDITOR
The cuts to the HSE budget for Older People is the biggest reduction in funding for any single care group programme between the years 2012 and 2013 (see Table 10, p7 HSE National Service Plan 2013). Note that the target of this funding cut cannot be explained by the dramatic reduction in Medical Card cover for over 70s as this comes from a separate revenue stream. Clarification is required as to how services will be affected by these measures.
